Observations, articles, opinions etc. in Dutch and English. The author, Bert de Bruin (Yonathan Dror Bar-On), is a Dutch-Jewish historian, who has specialized in modern Jewish history and in the history of the Middle East, and who in 1995 emigrated from the Netherlands to Israel. He wrote one book (2008), and edited another (2011), both in Dutch. For feedback please post a comment, or send this blog's author an email: (hisdutchname)atyahoodotcom

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Haiti

I do not tend to post requests from charities here, because..., well, I do not know exactly why not, but normally I don't. The other day I did receive a very polite, personal, friendly and urgent request from a representative an organization that I heard of before, but the work of which I was unfamiliar with, the International Medical Corps:
International Medical Corps is a global, humanitarian, nonprofit organization, founded by volunteer doctors and nurses and dedicated to saving lives and relieving suffering through relief and development programs. Our emergency response team is in Haiti responding in force and I would like to ask for your help to get the word out to the readers of Dutch Blog Israel. There are still thousands of patients seeking treatment of which approximately 80% are in need of surgery and are running out of time - especially with the tremendous aftershocks still devastating this country. The team is treating crush injuries, trauma, substantial wound care, shock and other critical cases with the few available supplies - And they're in it for the long haul. I would love your help spreading the word by blogging or tweeting about IMC's rescue efforts. We've put up a blogger friendly widget here on our site: http://www.imcworldwide.org/haiti With the widget it's really easy to let your readers know that donating $10 to help the people of Haiti is as simple as sending a text message of the word "haiti" to 85944. If you have any questions just let me know and I will do my best to help you out. If you are able to post the widget or tweet, I would appreciate it if you could send me the link.

I did not really have an idea what a widget is, but I checked the organization's site, and it appears to be kosher. They seem to do a lot of good work all over the world, and as far as I can see are not biased against Israel ( unlike NGOs such as Cordaid, Oxfam-Novib, Pax-Christi, see a report on UCP that I co-wrote ), so given the extraordinary dimensions of the tragedy in Haiti I did not see any reason why I should not do my tiny little bit to help the IMC do its work, by recommending and refering to it. You are invited to donate. If you want to donate to Jewish and/or Israeli charities that are active in Haiti, you are of course also welcome to do so. For example, through Zaka or IsraAid. Like IMC, both organizations are always a worthy cause.